Baldur's Gate II: The Anatomy of a Sequel

In
a project as content rich as Baldur's
Gate II, we didn't really have
to worry about cutting content. While
we shipped with nearly all the features
we originally planned, we did start
cutting quests and characters well
before the final testing phase. We
still ended up with over 200 hundred
hours of gameplay.

In
retrospect we should have started
this process many months earlier.
One of the dangers of development
is that game developers have a tendency
to always add content if they are
given time. They don't naturally spend
time limiting and polishing content;
instead, more time means more stuff.
It's wise to use that prioritized
feature list to hone the work (of
course ours was informal, which made
it a little difficult).

We
learned to look at our target date
and adjust our content development
accordingly. In many ways, quality
is more important than quantity. Even
though Baldur's Gate II was
bigger than Baldur's Gate,
the actual content was much better
quality - we just didn't realize how
much more we had made in BG2
until it was too late!

Test
Test Test

Because
of its immense size, Baldur's Gate
II was a tester's nightmare -
this was compounded by the fact that
we didn't do enough testing as areas
were being developed. Baldur's
Gate II contains roughly 290 distinct
quests - some of these are very small
(20 minutes long) while others are
quite large (a couple hours in length).
Each quest needed to be tested both
in single player and multiplayer modes.

The main lobby of the Hall of
Wonders.

During
testing we adopted a very sound task
and bug tracking method introduced
to us by Feargus Urquhart, the Director
of Black Isle Studios and Chris Parker
and Doug Avery, our Black Isle producers
(all of whom helped the project in
many different ways). We put a number
of white-boards in the halls of the
testing and design area and listed
all of the quests on the boards. We
then put an 'X' next to each quest.
We broke the designers and QA teams
into paired subgroups - each pair
(one tester and one designer) had
the responsibility of thoroughly checking
and fixing each quest. After they
were certain the quest was bulletproof,
its 'X' was removed. It took about
2 weeks to clear the board (on the
first pass).

In
addition to the subquest testing,
we had another BioWare QA team (consisting
not only of a couple people from QA,
but also some junior programmers and
some designers) work through the game
in multiplayer mode. This was in addition
to an Interplay Multiplayer QA team
working onsite at BioWare and the
nearly 30 QA people working down at
Interplay. The experience with Baldur's
Gate II reinforced the point that
role-playing games really need significant
QA commitment to be successful.

In
the end we found and crushed over
15,000 bugs in Baldur's Gate II.
Thanks to the hard work of everyone
involved in QA of Baldur's Gate
II we were able to ship a giant
game with no significant bugs.

The
Lesson: test early! You often don't
have the time at the end to test adequately.

The
Final Crunch

In
the final days of working on BG2
there was a strangely serene feeling
in the office. We didn't experience
the headlong panic that is sometimes
prevalent while finishing a game,
but we certainly did experience considerable
stress as we built 21 final candidates
in 3 days. After a few long nights
with the whole team playing the game
over and over again, we reached a
point where we built a good final
candidate. Then it was send to the
duplicators!

We
learned to save some energy during
the final crunch - because you need
it at the very end.

Post
Support

The
final area to mention regarding Baldur's
Gate II is the topic of post game
support. We've recently come to the
realization that we believe in personally
providing support to purchasers of
our games. Though we had always provided
this support, it was only after the
conclusion of BG2 that we formalized
it as one of the goals of BioWare.
A group of Line Producers, managed
by their Producers, have recently
been given the formal duty of providing
very quick (same day or as close to
it as possible) technical support
to fans - their goal is to make sure
people who purchase our games can
play them.

We
could rely on standard routes of customer
support (and we do have this as well
of course in the form of CS from our
publishers Black Isle/Interplay and
LucasArts) but we also want to make
the time to directly interface with
the purchasers of our games. After
all, who better to work through technical
issues than the people who made the
game? For the first weekend after
release we forgot to assign anyone
the duty of watching the message boards
and support ([email protected]) email
so the joint CEO's of BioWare did
it themselves. It was very entertaining
when people disputed whether it was
actually us on the boards or answering
their emails - they couldn't believe
that we would bother to answer them
in person (we did).

However,
one of the most important things we've
learned in our years in the industry
is how important it is to support
the fans that buy our games. This
means first shipping a bug-free product,
and second being completely available
to help people that are having trouble
with our games - on message boards,
via contact emails, and anywhere else
we can think of. What's the point
of making games if you can't make
sure people can play them?

Summary:
What worked Well:

Stable
engine technology

Team
dedication to the project

Veterans
returning to improve on a system
they created, ensuring familiarity
with the development pipeline and
engine

Good
project discipline

Quality
Assurance (QA) in the endgame

Summary:
What could have been better:

Fragmentation
of team communication

Content
bloat (Game too big)

Lack
of early Quality Assurance

Late
asset delivery - audio and sound

Poor
coordination of localization (translation)

Multi-player
- non pausing dialog, non-protagonist
characters

Conclusion

In
conclusion we'd like to thank all
of the people that worked on Baldur's
Gate II, both on the development
team at BioWare and at our publisher
Black Isle Studios/Interplay. Like
any big game BG2 had its ups
and downs, but in the end we are all
very proud of the game we made. We
hope this retrospective provides you
the reader some insight into our development
methods and gives you some tangible
ideas that you can apply to your own
productions. In the end, it's all
about the game - if you've put forth
an honest effort you will always be
satisfied with the result.

Author's
note: Special thanks to the entire
Baldur's Gate II team for working
so damn hard, being so good to work
with, and for creating a great sequel.
Thanks as well to everyone else at
BioWare and our publishers Black Isle/Interplay
and LucasArts for their outstanding
efforts on all of our other projects
currently in development - Neverwinter
Nights, Baldur's Gate II expansion
pack, Star Wars RPG, and MDK2: Armageddon.